The band Noel Gallagher thought were “corporate punk”
For many rock enthusiasts, punk is more of a mentality than a genre of music. Even though the genre’s inception sent shockwaves through the music community and brought every commercial rock band back down to Earth, the ethos of punk seemed to matter more than the music, looking to rebel against any establishment keeping you down. Although Noel Gallagher may have claimed to be everything that punk stood for, he admitted that one of the spokesmen for the genre was anything but authentic.
When the genre was first being born, Gallagher was still putting together his first handful of chords on the guitar. Indebted to the work of classic rock acts like The Beatles and Neil Young, Gallagher remembered being transformed when he heard Sex Pistols’ Nevermind the Bollocks for the first time.
While punk had seen its first real flirtation with the mainstream with bands like Sex Pistols and Ramones, it wasn’t until the 1990s that everything went above ground. Thanks to the sounds of grunge music, the punk ethos again found itself in high fashion, making every glamorous rock band look like posers by comparison.
Although Gallagher wouldn’t get to appreciate grunge bands like Nirvana for that long, he was already putting together the basis of Oasis with his brother Liam. With the release of Definitely Maybe, Gallagher had crafted songs with the melodic sensibilities of classic rock and punk attitude, thanks in part to Liam’s snarl on ‘Supersonic’ and ‘Bring It On Down’.
While Oasis was delivering punk to the masses in the UK, Green Day was making waves with a power-pop update on the genre. Instead of pulling from Sex Pistols for his muse, Billie Joe Armstrong was just as likely to crib ideas from The Jam and Cheap Trick, which made for pop-rock ear candy on tracks like ‘Basket Case’.
By the time the band reinvented themselves with their punk rock opera American Idiot, Gallagher had no time for Green Day’s brand of rock and roll anymore. Aside from the sonic similarities between their hit ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ and ‘Wonderwall’, Gallagher thought the band was a cheap imitation of what punk rock was supposed to be.
When talking about Green Day after the fact, Noel thought they were one of the worst bands working today, saying, “They consider themselves to be a kick-ass rock and roll band. That couldn’t be more kick-ass if they tried. They’re obviously a corporate punk band –and they ripped off one of my songs! They should at least have the decency to wait until I’m dead”.
Even though both bands would have some of the biggest rock releases of the 2000s, they would go in different directions in the next decade. As Noel broke up Oasis and moved on to his solo career, his music began to take on a mellower feeling, walking away from the punky sounds of Oasis’s best material while Green Day kept soldiering. While Noel may not have seen the merit in Green Day making an imitation of punk, their legacy as one of the most enduring rock bands of the modern age was solidified years ago.
